On the Internet, content sharing platforms or other applications allow users to upload, view, and share digital content such as media items. Such media items may include audio clips, movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content, such as video blogging, short original videos, pictures, photos, other multimedia content, etc. Users may use computing devices (such as smart phones, cellular phones, laptop computers, desktop computers, netbooks, tablet computers, gaming consoles, television consoles) to use, play, and/or consume media items (e.g., watch digital videos, and/or listen to digital music).
The content sharing platforms can include one or more channels, which can be viewable over the Internet. A channel is a mechanism for providing certain media items and/or for providing access to media items to users for consumption. Media items for the channel can be selected by a user, uploaded by a user, selected by a content provider, or selected by a broadcaster.
Traditional search systems, recommendation systems, and/or promotion systems evaluate a source of media items (e.g., videos) to generate search results, recommendations of the media items, and/or promotions of the media items generally based on how likely users are to watch the media items in the short term. For example, conventional solutions typically identify standalone viral videos, which are videos that become popular through the process of Internet sharing, usually through video sharing websites, social media and email. The videos may be famous for a spike of time, such as a month or a few weeks. The viral video may be one of multiple videos that are offered by a channel. With such traditional solutions, a user generally watches the viral video multiple times and/or a significant number of users watch the viral video to cause the video to become popular. The users, however, typically do not return to the channel that provides the viral video, and as a result, the other videos that are offered by the channel are usually not consumed.
Other conventional solutions generate search results, recommendations of the media items, and/or promotions of the media items generally based on how likely users are going to subscribe to a channel. Users may subscribe to one or more channels to be able to automatically view media items (e.g., videos) of the channel. For example, Channel-ABCD may have over one million subscribers. The traditional solutions may be successful in recommending and promoting certain channels in order to get users to subscribe to the channels, but generally, the subscribers of the channels do not return back to the channel to consume the media other items that are provided by the channel.
Traditional solutions that identify media items for short-term consumption (e.g., viral videos), and conventional solutions that focus on obtaining subscriptions, generally do not predict the likelihood of users visiting a channel multiple times.